Enhancing the accessibility of mathematics for blind people: The audiomath project

Abstract

"How can a blind person surpass the difficulty in reading an on-line document's mathematical expressions? Why wasn't this completely solved yet? Is it not necessary? Is not easy?" - These questions are only the top of the iceberg of a big problem with accessibility in the Internet. This concerns technical, scientific or even simple documents presented on-line that involve mathematical expressions. Addressing these issues the authors developed the AudioMath [1] project at LSS. It can be connected to a text-to-speech engine (TTS), providing speech rendering of the W3C's MathML [2, 3] coded mathematical expressions. The paper intends to present the project methodology as well as the results already obtained. With AudioMath we intend to increase the accessibility of, not only, e-learning websites that use MathML, but also general websites. Therefore, AudioMath is an accessibility tool that can bring great benefits for visual impaired persons, but not only. © Springer-Verlag 2004.